Friday, April 17, 2015

Down on the Farm. Another BDS fail

While anti-Israel activists chortled over their short-lived BDS paper "victory" at Stanford, the Board of Trustees was gathering information to formally denounce it, and Hillel was preparing the last laughOn April 7, the Graduate School of Business hosted its third annual Israeli Entrepreneurship Fair, an event for Israeli companies from Silicon Valley. This event was a collaboration between Hillel at Stanford University and the Israeli students of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and featured 15 companies involved with social media, crowd funding, cyber-security and bio-tech

Over 300 students attended, meeting representatives from the various companies, listening to presentations and watching demos of new products.
From the Stanford Daily:

“When you look at the education backgrounds of all the [GSB] professors, the most overrepresented university outside the U.S. is Hebrew [University],” said Ophir Samson, a first year graduate student at the GSB and one of the organizers of the fair. Tal Briller, who works in tech in Silicon Valley, and Yaron Fishelson, a staff member at Hillel, also organized the fair.

Samson added that the link between Stanford and Israel extends beyond its faculty. He explained that Israel, like Silicon Valley, has a culture that is well disposed to startups and tech companies.

“There’s more venture capital per head [in Israel] than any other place in the world; there are more startups per capita than any [other] place in the world; and The Economist recently voted it the second-best place in the world to be an entrepreneur, after Silicon Valley,” Samson said. “So naturally there are strong links between Silicon Valley and Israel. And the [GSB] has a very… important role in nurturing that.”

Samson was excited by the turnout, explaining that many of the companies represented at the fair are “some of the top Israeli entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.”

If you are looking for more opportunities to learn from the Start-up nation, consider a week or more at the Innovnation Summer Program, studying with leading Israeli entrepreneurs while earning academic credits at Hebrew University's Rothberg International School.To SJP and the BDS cru- how does it feel to be irrelevant?